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RUR (Rossum’s Universal Robots)

R.U.R. was written in 1920, premiered in Prague early in 1921, was performed in New York in 1922, and published in English translation in 1923. The following year, G. B. Shaw and G. K. Chesterton were among those in London participating in a public discussion of the play. Capek responded, via The Saturday Review, to what he felt was the excessive thematic attention they and other critics paid to one of his devices: “For myself, I confess that as the author I was much more interested in men than in Robots.” [1]

Virtually every encyclopedia or textbook etymology of the word “robot” mentions the play R.U.R. Although the immediate worldwide success of the play immediately popularized the word (supplanting the earlier “automaton”), it was actually not Karel Capek but his brother Josef, also a respected Czech writer, who coined the word. The Czech word robota means “drudgery” or “servitude”; a robotnik is a peasant or serf.

Although the term today conjures up images of clanking metal contraptions, Capek’s Robots (always capitalized) are more accurately the product of what we would now call genetic engineering. The play describes “kneading troughs” and “vats” for processing a chemical subst

itute for protoplasm, and a “stamping mill” for forming Robot bodies. A more imaginative and scientifically plausible description of the artificial creation of armies of workers would have to wait for Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). [2]

The translator (Paul Selver) changed the play quite a bit while preparing the English version, combining two Robot characters into one, and considerably toning down the ending. If you’re interested in reading the play as it was originally presented to American audiences, read the 1920s version (most university libraries will have a copy — it was tremendously popular in its day).

In the 1990s, a new translation, with much better dialogue and a chilling new final speech (new to English audiences, anyway) by the Robot Damon, was published in a Capek reader called Toward the Radical Center (with a short introduction by Arthur Miller).

Plot Summary (spoilers)

In R.U.R., the idealistic young Helena Glory arrives at the remote island factory of Rossum’s Universal Robots, on a mission from a humanitarian organization devoted to liberating the Robots. From Domin (sometimes translated as “Domain”), she receives a compressed account of the company’s father-and-son founders (who do not appear in the play). The mad inventor Old Rossum was bent on usurping the role of the Creator by artificially reproducing a man in painstaking detail, while the practical industrialist Young Rossum produced a stripped-down version of humanity to be sold as inexpensive workers:

Domin

: Practically speaking, what is the best kind of worker?

Helena

: The best? Probably the one who– who– who is honest– and dedicated.

Domin

: No, it’s the one that’s the cheapest. The one with the fewest needs… [Young Rossum] chucked out everything not directly related to work, and [in] doing that he virtually rejected the human being and created the Robot. (41)

Mass-produced by Robot-run assembly lines, Robots remember everything, and think of nothing new. According to Domin, “They’d make fine university professors.” Rejecting Helena’s theory that Robots have souls, the psychologist Hallemeier admits that once in a while, a Robot will throw down his work and start gnashing his teeth. The human managers treat such an event as evidence of a product defect, but Helena prefers to interpret it as a sign of the emerging soul.

Domin rather inexplicably asks Helena to marry him. She accepts, but continues working to help the Robots by requesting that a scientist modify some Robots, so that their souls might develop more fully. One of the modified creatures is a Robotess, beautiful but useless. The scientist speculates that if the Robotess (named after her spiritual mother Helena) were to “wake up,” she would hate him for making her so beautiful, yet giving her a body that cannot know love or give birth. The human Helena begins identifying with hothouse flowers — sterile because they are artificially cultivated, satisfying a consumer demand that nature fulfills too slowly on her own. Meanwhile, human fertility has been dropping worldwide; industrial civilization’s drive towards order and mechanization has made mankind superfluous.

The price would appear to be the gradual extermination of the human race; but one of Helena’s specially modified Robots issues a manifesto: “Robots of the world, you are ordered to exterminate the human race… Work must not cease!”

Domain possesses Old Rossum’s formula for producing Robots — a bargaining tool he hopes to use to ensure the freedom of the humans holed up in the factory. Helena, who has been kept ignorant of the real threat the Robots propose, decides to burn the formula, on the theory that halting the production of the Robots will halt the spread of economic and political collapse. The Robots swarm onto the stage, killing all the humans, leaving only Alquist — the only human at the factory who still works with his hands. The Robot leader Damon plans to populate the earth: “We will give birth by machine. We will build a thousand steam-powered mothers. From them will pour forth a river of life. Nothing but life! Nothing but Robots!”

This dream, spoken by Damon (a demon?) echoes the dream of Domin (Dominus, the Lord?) — both hope to use machinery to improve upon the work of nature. Without the all-important manuscript, however, the Robots discover “The only thing we cannot produce is Robots. The machines are turning out nothing but bloody chunks of meat.” [3] They cajole, threaten and beg Alquist to help them discover what they call “the secret of life.” In desperation, Damon offers himself up for study; screaming on the dissection table, he orders Alquist to continue the search.

Nature eventually re-emerges triumphant when two Robots (the beautiful but otherwise useless Helena, and Primus) fall in love. The play ends on an uplifting, religious note. Alquist blesses the lovers, renames them Adam and Eve, and sends them out to avoid the sins that destroyed their predecessors.

Links

The Humans are Dead This video of a Flight of the Conchords song spoofs the science-fiction conventions that RUR deeply embedded in our culture; I’d rate the video PG-13 for language.

Reciprocal Links (Archived)

I am no longer actively updating these links, but someone from the BBC’s My Science Fiction Life contacted me and asked me for a link. The page she sent me taught me something I didn’t know about RUR, so here’s the link.

Notes

[1] Capek’s obituary in Newsweek (January 2, 1939) said of R.U.R.: “Although he believed it the least interesting of all his works, it brought him greatest fame.”

[2] In Brave New World, factories stimulate the budding and multiplication of selected fertilized ova, and then deliberately stunt the development of the embryonic humans. When “decanted” and conditioned for service, the lower orders make the undamaged elite appear to be supermen.

[3] “The skin does not stick to the flesh and the flesh does not cling to the bones.” Damon’s lament reverses the Biblical miracle of the enfleshment of the dry bones in the desert.